Building orbital resilience: Prevention, protection and prediction
- Satellite Evolution Group
- Nov 24, 2025
- 5 min read
The accelerating growth of satellites and space activity is turning Earth’s orbit into an increasingly congested environment. The European Space Agency’s Zero Debris Technical Booklet is an ambitious and welcome step toward solving this problem but delivering on the vision will depend on industry’s ability to move from commitment to capability and from regulation to real-world implementation.
Richard Jacklin, Commercial Lead for Space at Plextek and James Snape, Founder of Aphelion Industries
What was once a domain of scientific exploration is now a crowded commercial arena, serving as a global infrastructure layer critical to communications, navigation, climate monitoring, and defense. Yet this dependence is threatened by a growing, largely invisible hazard: the escalating volume of orbital debris. `
The European Space Agency’s Zero Debris Technical Booklet offers a framework for achieving a debris-neutral orbital environment by 2030, setting out the practical measures and engineering focus areas needed to improve the safety and resilience of future missions and safeguard access to space for generations to come.
But strategy and policy alone are not enough.
The Rising Threat of Orbital Debris
The data tells a stark story. The number of active satellites that orbit Earth is projected to surge from 12,000 today to over 40,000 by the early 2030s, and each new launch increases the risk of collision exponentially.
Current estimates put annual losses from space debris collisions at US$100 million with most occurring between 600- and 900-kilometers altitude, the same orbital band where much of our critical infrastructure resides. By 2030, this figure could exceed US$1 billion per year, highlighting how quickly the challenge is escalating.
Even if humanity were to stop launching new satellites tomorrow, orbital debris would still multiply for years to come. Over 140 million fragments smaller than one centimeter now orbit Earth, joined by more than 1.2 million between one and ten centimeters in size. Only a tiny fraction, roughly 1 percent, can be tracked with any reliability. These may seem small and insignificant, but they are anything but. For instance, a clear example from the European Space Agency reported a 7mm chip was found in one of the windows on the International Space Station’s Cupola, caused by “a tiny piece of space debris, possibly a paint flake or small metal fragment no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimeter across”. It’s a reminder that micro-fragments are not a distant or hypothetical threat; they are striking operational spacecraft today and leaving lasting damage.
This means that most of the threat is invisible to us on Earth, and the industry remains heavily reliant on theoretical models rather than sustained, in-orbit observation. Without better data, policy enforcement becomes guesswork, and risk management becomes reactive instead of preventative.
Building the systems needed for orbital safety
ESA’s Zero Debris Vision sets six priority goals: preventing debris release, ensuring clearance at end-of-life, preventing break-ups, improving surveillance, avoiding ground casualties, and mitigating adverse consequences. These are not abstract aspirations, they are engineering and operational challenges that must be met with practical, measurable solutions.
Meeting these goals requires a systems approach that combines prevention, protection, and prediction:
Prevention through responsible design, modular architecture, and reliable de-orbit systems.
Protection through smarter, lower-mass shielding and redundancy to limit fragmentation.
Prediction through real-time situational awareness and in-orbit measurement of debris density and trajectory.
The path to zero debris lies not in any single technology but in the integration of these capabilities and in building a satellite network capable of detecting and avoiding trackable threats while withstanding untrackable ones. This technological ecosystem must be underpinned by transparent data-sharing frameworks and open innovation partnerships that link commercial, defense, and scientific stakeholders.
No single organization or agency can address this alone; progress will depend on a coordinated effort from a broad coalition of innovators working toward a shared operational goal.
Economics of debris: the cost of inaction
In the aerospace industry, the financial stakes are high and not limited to spacecraft operators alone. The space insurance market offers a clear warning. Out of roughly 13,000 active satellites, only about 300 are insured, and most collision-related losses are excluded from coverage. When unquantified risk dominates, insurers pull back, premiums spike, and investor confidence erodes.
During the 2018/2019 insurance crisis, underwriters paid out more than they earned, forcing some to withdraw from the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) market altogether. This exposed how fragile the sector becomes when survivability cannot be reliably assessed. And the message was clear: without reliable data and improved survivability, space is uninsurable.
The economic case for action is therefore overwhelming. Investment in orbital debris prevention and protection yields exponential returns by reducing insurance volatility, enabling sustained private investment, and ensuring that access to space remains commercially viable.
Conversely, the cost of inaction is existential. If key orbital regions become unusable, the consequences extend far beyond the space sector, with global communications, navigation, and Earth observation quite possibly being disrupted for decades.
OECD modelling indicates that a Kessler Syndrome event could inflict USD $191 billion in immediate global losses, while broader economic forecasts estimate sustained long-term damage of roughly 1.95 percent of global GDP.
Aligning policy and investment for orbital safety
ESA’s leadership has galvanized the global conversation, but funding and implementation lag far behind the scale of the problem. National budgets tell the story. The UK Space Agency’s 2025/26 plan, for instance, allocates only £4 million to In-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing, less than 1 percent of its total budget, despite identifying it as key to space sustainability. Across Europe, similar funding asymmetries persist between strategic rhetoric and technological execution.
Tod close this gap, policymakers must embrace dual-use innovation, recognizing that technologies developed for defense, communications, or lunar exploration can also underpin debris mitigation and orbital safety. Conversely, space-safety technologies should be recognized as serving national security and industrial strategy objectives.
Funding models must evolve beyond linear grants toward hybrid public-private frameworks that incentivize operational deployment. Space debris management is a public good, but it will only scale sustainably through private sector participation and market mechanisms.
Two years to secure the future of Low Earth Orbit
The next two years will determine whether the world achieves ESA’s 2030 target or misses it by a generation. The urgency is compounded by the exponential growth of mega-constellations and thousands of satellites being launched into already crowded orbital lanes.
This expansion presents both opportunity and risk. Each new network brings global connectivity but also raises the probability of collision cascades that could lock humanity out of Low Earth Orbit entirely.
If industry acts now, deploying measurement instruments, refining shielding systems, sharing data, and standardizing end-of-life procedures, the 2030 milestone remains achievable. If not, the orbital commons may degrade beyond repair.
A final call for global action on space debris
ESA’s Zero Debris Vision offers more than a regulatory target, it represents a test of global innovation, collaboration, and shared responsibility. The technology and the knowledge exist. What’s required is the collective will to fund, integrate, and deploy it with urgency.
The orbital environment humanity inherits in 2030 will be the direct consequence of choices made in the next 12 to 24 months. This is the period in which preventative action still carries meaningful impact.
Achieving a debris-neutral future will not happen through policy statements or conference declarations. It will happen when industry leaders, agencies, and governments align resources and act decisively to turn technical capability into sustained operational practice, ensuring space remains a sustainable, secure domain for all.
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